


Heat

by blithers



Category: Run (TV 2020)
Genre: Alpha/Beta/Omega Dynamics, Alpha/Omega, College, F/M, Friends With Benefits, Knotting, Mating Cycles/In Heat
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-07-21
Updated: 2021-01-19
Packaged: 2021-03-05 05:55:06
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 5
Words: 17,367
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25429519
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/blithers/pseuds/blithers
Summary: Ruby wakes up with a pretty gnarly headache just after winter break, checks her calendar, and thinksoh shit.
Relationships: Billy Johnson/Ruby Richardson
Comments: 20
Kudos: 39





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you to htbthomas for the beta read. ♥

Ruby meets Billy Johnson the first week of college. She doesn’t take much notice of him at first: it’s orientation week, and the university is a wash of new faces, so one gawky red-headed Irish kid mostly blends into the crowd. She knows he lives a floor down from her in the dorms, and he doesn’t seem to know what to make of her architecture major, but that’s about it.

They have meeting groups where they’re broken out into orientation and given designation-specific talks - Ruby’s is the typical omega bullshit to _not forget your scent blockers_ and how to call heats into the University medical office and the abuse/emergency hotlines set up specifically for omegas - and then, amazingly enough, designation is basically never mentioned again except in academic contexts. She’s never lived a life where designation mattered less, and it feels like an actual academic utopia in a way she never expected to be real: the examined life, with a staff and students who seem to value Ruby for her skills and mind rather than stereotyping her by the fact that she wants to get railed senseless by some alpha twice a year. It’s pretty amazing.

So she and Billy, they’re in a couple of the same classes. Eventually, they’re walking together from the math building to the south lecture hall, because why not. Which is when she realizes that this kid with the awkward, growing-into-it face - she likes him. She gets a kick out of him; they _vibe_.

Billy’s an alpha, Ruby knows this instinctively, in the deep-rooted way that she also knows that her new next door neighbor is a beta and the dude who’s always playing Counter-Strike late at night in the labs is another omega, just like her. But it doesn’t seem to matter, even though Ruby usually finds most alphas obnoxious, self-important pills. The college has a mandatory scent-blocking policy and isolated ventilation units in all rooms and scent distorters in the classrooms and common rooms, so except for the occasional multi-day absence of classmates or teachers orientation doesn’t seem to affect life much. It doesn’t seem to affect her friendship with Billy, either.

It’s like, sure, Billy is sort of tall (typical for an alpha, really) and can be kind of a jerk sometimes (right on brand) and he smells _amazing_ (miles better than any alpha she’s ever known before), but it’s still a pleasant, low-key buzz. Like cologne, discreetly worn. Like the way some people have smiles where you instinctively want to smile back at them, or have a sly way of telling a joke that makes you want to laugh along. It’s chemistry, she supposes, basic chemistry, and the two of them have it in some way that she doesn’t really get. It’s doesn’t have to be one of those dumb, stereotypical, lurid alpha-and-omega things - it can be a Billy-and-Ruby thing. They’re two people who just happen to get along.

Whatever. It’s easy enough to ignore, and it doesn’t matter, not when she’s got homework to do and exams to study for and way too much on her plate at the end of each day. It’s not like Billy likes her like that anyway - he’s clear enough about his preferences - and his preferences aren’t her.

That’s all there is to it, and all there ever needs to be.

*

“No way, she totally did not.”

“She did! Swear to fuckin’ god.”

“Get out,” Ruby says, and shoves his shoulder. “Get out of this house with that bullshit.”

Billy’s got a beer and Ruby a cup of some sort of shitty mixed drink, and they’re at a party that Billy had texted her about an hour or so ago, begging her to come and save him from utter boredom. Which is totally a dirty lie, and they both know it, but Ruby didn’t have anything better to do and besides, a night out had sounded like just the thing after the quiz she’s pretty sure she cratered earlier in the day.

“She’s in your comp class, right?” he asks.

“Yeah.”

“She’s hot,” he says, and his accent makes the word both ridiculous and kind of sexier than normal: _hawt_.

“Whatever, man. Keep it in your pants.”

He laughs. “I’m just saying.”

A couple of their classmates from their calc class wander over, and Billy lures them into his world without even trying. Ruby sometimes wonders at the way he can do that. Billy’s attractive enough - skinny for his size, too thin for his frame and gangly in the way of somebody who recently came into a big growth spurt, but he’s got a sort of charm that makes it all work, when he wants. He’s whip-smart (too smart for his own good, really), but he can reign in the sharpness when he wants, play-acting a world where he’s more genial than he really is. Where other people are more wholly interesting to him than Ruby thinks they actually are.

Billy throws an arm over Ruby’s shoulder as they chat, completely absorbed in this douchebag beta’s theory on designation politics, like Ruby is some prop who exists in that moment just to help him pose more effectively. Ruby lets it go for a minute, then shrugs him off, stepping out from under his reach. She tries not to feel resentful of how good he smells, that close up. After all, it’s not Billy’s fault. It’s not like he knows.

Ruby wanders off, and catches up for a while with this girl who’s in her sophomore year in architecture, then examines what’s left of her sad vodka-y mixed drink and dumps it righteously down the sink. She’s looking for the door to head out when she runs into Billy again. He lights up when he sees her, ridiculously happy, like he’s been missing her nonstop the last hour or so.

“Ruby!” His tone is a bit slurred now. “My Ruby girl.”

“Hey, you,” Ruby says, feeling a bit more cheery thinking about how sick Billy’s probably going to be in the morning. “Enjoying yourself?”

“Always. But even more now that I’m talking to you again.”

“Well, enjoy the moment, because I’m heading back to the dorms. I’ve got an 8 AM class tomorrow morning.”

He crowds in close to her, and his hand slides against the scent gland at the back of her wrist. Ruby yanks herself a step backward and shoves her hands in her pockets. She wonders if he did that on purpose. No way. He’s drunk: it had to have been an accident.

“C’mon,” he’s saying, weirdly intent on her. “Don’t leave me here all alone.”

“Sorry.” Ruby raises an eyebrow. “And yet I’ll bet you can find a way to drown your sorrows.”

“Cruel,” he says, but he steps back from her.

“Text me later so I know you’re alive, okay?”

“You got it, boss.”

Ruby walks back in the crisp night air, stars faint above her with the haze of city lights. She lets herself smell her wrist once, and tries not to think about it anymore.

*

And so it goes, until Ruby wakes up with a pretty gnarly headache just after winter break, checks her calendar, and thinks _oh shit_.

It feels like her heat sneaks up on her every time, which is ridiculous considering she’s always been pretty regular, but it’s just long enough between occurrences that it’s weirdly easy to let time slip away. So she fills out the paperwork and arranges her absence from class for the next couple days, then heads out to the store to stock up on trail mix and protein bars and Gatorade like she’s about to go hike the Appalachian Trail. She turns on the radio when she’s back in her dorm room, queues up downloads for some embarrassingly on-the-nose porn, and searches “having your first heat at college” so she can browse a bunch of peppy, go-get-’em! websites and one particularly hilarious article titled The 10 Best Ways to Keep Studying During Your Heat which, ha ha, nope, no fucking way.

She’s browsing idly through some forum, doped up on Tylenol to keep the achy feeling at bay, having fun mocking all the obvious wish-fulfillment letter to the Penthouse-style posts that are like, “Reader, I never thought it would happen to _me_ , blah blah blah hot freshman omega, blah blah blah the next thing I knew I was having the best sex of my life” when Ruby sits up straight from all the normal prep she does for her heat, and thinks: wait. Wait a goddamn second.

Those shitty, fake stories could be _her_. That could be her life.

Heats are miserable. Heats are the worst, the actual worst; it’s humiliating, really, to have to writhe around twice a year and desparately wish you could be having sex, to have it _hurt_ like fuck-all just because you don’t happen to have some alpha knotting you and calming you down with how great they smell, and instead have to unsatisfyingly and slowly masturbate your way back to sanity while everybody knows exactly what is happening to you.

But that doesn’t have to be her life, not this time.

Heats are better when you’re with somebody. It’s what everybody says: it’s common sense, it’s biology. Heats are, as far as Ruby has read, a lot better. Like, the-reason-the-heat-cycle-exists-in-the-first-place better. _Astronomically_ better.

And Ruby doesn’t live at home anymore. She goes to college; she’s basically an adult. She has a room in the dorms all to herself with her very own twin XL bed, a superb ventilation system, a bathroom that she doesn’t even share, and a free get-out-of-school pass. She’s set.

And, as for the alpha, well, there’s…

There’s....

Well. She supposes there’s Billy.

It’s a ludicrous thought, and yet somehow possible, at the same time. Asking some alpha to see you through your heat is the setup for every bad porno ever, a whole erotic universe of omegas going randomly into immediate, unplanned heats while hanging out with their bangable stepsibling or hot single college professor or whatever. She and Billy aren’t like that, anyway: their friendship has in no way encompassed anything like this at all. Besides, she's pretty sure he's out of her league.

...And yet.

One: Billy’s straight, or at least attracted to women. She’s sure of it. Sure, he’s never really shown specific interest in her, but why would he? She’s never been the sort of girl that guys are into. Besides, they’re friends. It’s just never been their thing.

Two: Billy’s single. She knows he’s single, and relatively sure he’s not even seeing somebody casually; he’s never even mentioned an ex back home in Ireland that he pines for but they maturely broke up when he left for the States or whatever.

Three: Billy smells _good_. He smells like how really hot people look in formal clothes and the way the world feels before you kiss somebody for the first time; mouthwateringly good, coyly and tantalizingly close, a promise you want to keep and break at the same time.

It’s not like she’d be asking him to marry her or anything like that. It’s sex, they’re college students, and Ruby can definitely proposition a friend to do a casual heat thing with her. And Billy might be into that - he’s a dude, with what Ruby can only hope is a normal dude libido, who might jump at the chance for a no strings attached fuck with somebody that he’s not otherwise interested in or super attracted to. The worst he can say is no, after all, and then she’d simply have to die of acute embarrassment and never speak to him again and probably go into witness protection, but, you know, that’s life. She could live with that, maybe.

So: Billy.

_Billy._

She has a sudden flash, an actual, physical scent memory, of how good Billy smells. Her stomach turns over and she whispers, “oh fuck,” alone, by herself, in her room.

The more she thinks about it, the more possible it feels, until Ruby gives up and masturbates in her desk chair, because she literally can’t focus on anything else. She whites out as she orgasms, curling her toes into the carpet. It’s good, it’s intensely good, it actually takes the edge off her oncoming heat, which masturbation so rarely does.

Right. She’s probably got a day before the real deal hits and she’s panting for it like it’s her mission in life. Which means, if she’s actually going to do this crazy thing, she needs to put up and actually ask Billy.

She pulls out her phone, finds Billy’s number. She taps the side of her phone, and types:

_hey, need to talk, you free?_


	2. Chapter 2

Ruby wakes up the next morning with a splitting headache, a missed call from Billy, and a text saying that he’ll see her at their class in the morning, which - Ruby checks the time - yeah, oops, she’s already missed.

“Fuck,” she says with feeling, and slams her head back on her pillow. She feels shitty, her head pounding and mouth dry. She knows she needs to eat and drink something, but the effort seems so vast that Ruby rolls over instead, pulls her blanket back over her head, and spends the next few hours dozing fitfully, as the sunlight through her window strengthens and inches relentlessly toward her bed.

When Ruby wakes up again there are a couple of worried texts from Billy asking if she’s alright and her headache is even worse. Ruby drags herself over to her bathroom, pops some pills, washes them down straight from the tap like a dog, and lies down again on the linoleum floor until the meds kick in.

It’s the afternoon, and she still hasn’t talked to Billy yet. Fuckity fuck fuck.

She texts Billy back to let him know she’s alive, then she drags herself into the shower and slathers herself in body wash designed to mask her scent. The shower is blissfully hot: the painkillers work their magic as she stands under the spray, and she feels normal enough at that point to put in the effort and shave, as a gift to her future self. Ruby towels off, debates, then reaches for one of the chemical suppressant gel pills that somewhat delay the start of your heat. She doesn’t take them normally - you pay for it later in intensity, once the suppressent wears off and the heat kicks in - but sometimes the price is worth it. Ruby really, really needs to talk to Billy like a normal person right now.

Food next.

She walks down the cafeteria, and only one person - an alpha woman with short hair and double-pierced ears - gives her a second, startled look. Ruby eats her sandwich at a table as far away as possible from other people. She’s nursing a bottle of water when Billy texts her back.

_you alive or what_

_sort of_ , she writes back. _you around?_

Billy lives on campus, in one of the other dorms, but has a job in one of the restaurants downtown. It’s hard to keep track of his schedule most of the time.

 _heading to the library_. Then: _sorry you’re not feeling well_.

_can you stop by my room when you get the chance?_

_Sure. Give me 20 and I’ll see you then_.

*

The knock comes, and Ruby yanks the door open, surprising Billy in the process of knocking a second time.

“I’m going into heat,” she blurts out, and the words hang awkwardly between them, and Ruby realizes, with a strange little jolt, that while they talk all the time about all sorts of random shit, she’s pretty sure they’ve never actually said the words _omega_ or _alpha_ to each other, about either of them.

“You… what?” Billy gawks at her from the hallway, at a loss for words, fist still raised to knock, like he’s never even heard the word _heat_ before. Or knows what designations are. Or understands English. It’s all obviously bullshit.

Ruby glances both ways before dragging him into her dorm room, closing the door behind them and hissing, “ _Heat_. I’m going into heat, you idiot. Don’t make me yell it.”

The scent of her room seems to hit him hard; he plasters his body back against the door, hands spread wide, like he’s attempting to attach himself like a lamprey to the nearest surface. His eyes dilate, like he just took a hit of some drug. He swallows.

“You… you’re an omega.”

Ruby rolls her eyes, because no way does he not know. “You know I am.”

“I -” He takes a deep breath in, then starts coughing, color flushing up high on his pale face. Ruby doesn’t know what her scent is doing right now, but she can only assume, based on the way he’s acting, that it’s _intense_. Her scent blockers must be old or defunct or something.

He takes a couple shallow breaths, then tries again. “I did know. That you were an omega. You always smelled so -” He takes another shallow breath, like he’s steadying himself. “I tried not to think about it. You -” He hesitates again. His eyes are almost black now. “You smell so _good_ ,” he finishes, in this strained little whisper.

“And you’re an alpha,” Ruby continues, just to make sure they’re being super clear about things.

His Adam’s apple bobs nervously and his hand flexes against the doorframe. “Yes.”

“How have we not talked about this before?”

“We - I don’t -” His eyes are starting to glaze over. “I guess I figured if you wanted to talk about it you’d bring it up.”

“Well, I’m bringing it up now.”

“Right.” He nods, then shakes his head, then nods again. “You’re bringing it up now.”

“No time like the present.”

“Right, right.”

“Dick face!” Ruby says brightly, just to see if he’ll even react at all.

He startles, laughs a little bit more like his normal self, then says “Fuck stick!” with great feeling.

“Do you want to, um, open the window or something?” she asks, because this is not going at all like she’d been thinking it would. She knows that alphas are affected by omegas in heat - omega hormones trigger alpha ruts, putting both parties into the mood for the requisite otherwise-painful days of sex - but she’s never had anybody react like this to her before she’d even started her actual heat. It’s a new one.

“Jesus. Yeah. That’s probably a good idea.” He sizes her up as an obstacle to freedom and basically sprints for it, dodging her and heading for the single window in her dorm. He wrestles the sliding latch open and cold, lovely winter air seeps in.

Billy presses his forehead against the screen, eyes closed.

“How are you so calm?” he asks after a couple long moments. He sounds a bit more rational. “I feel like I’m about to jump out the window or something.”

“Wow, thanks.”

He shoots her a dirty, annoyed little glance. “You basically ambushed me. I really could have used some warning. How come you’re acting so normal, anyway?”

“I doped myself up. Suppressants and painkillers. It’s working, amazingly enough.”

“You’re as normal as you’ll ever be,” he agrees, and she can hear the strain as he tries for something like their normal back-and-forth.

Ruby laughs.

“Yeah,” she says. “That’s true. Don’t feel bad, I’ve got science and chemistry on my side.”

“I don’t feel bad,” he says. “It’s just… a lot. You’re a lot.”

“Thanks again?” she says.

“It’s a compliment.”

“I guess? Anyway, thanks for stopping by.”

“Yeah, no problem. Did you, um -” It seems to occur to Billy that he doesn’t know why he’s here. His gaze shifts around her room, like he’s looking for the thing that’s wrong that he can help fix, like her bathroom sink is flooding and obviously he’s a plumber or whatever. “Did you, uh, need help? Do you want me to get you anything?”

“I was - ” Ruby starts, then blanks. She blanks hard. Oh shit. How does she actually _say_ this? She hadn’t been thinking about this part.

Billy soldiers on, oblivious to the deer-in-the-headlights routine she’s pulling. “Did you want me to grab your assignments for you from your classes?”

“No. I mean… maybe, but that’s not what I - “

“Then what’s up?”

“I guess, I was thinking that - you know, you and me, we , ah - well, we’re friends, right, and I was just thinking that maybe you might be able to - help. Me.”

“Of course I’ll help you,” he says, admirably patient. “That’s what I’m saying.”

“ _Help_ me,” she repeats. “With - you know. Alpha, omega, that whole thing.” Ruby mashes her hands together once or twice, illustratively, trying to sound nonchalant. This is going _terribly_. She’s trying not to let her desperation about what happens if Billy says no bleed into her voice.

Billy straightens up, and takes a step closer to her. The tips of his ears are stained with red, making his ginger hair seem that much more ridiculous, like a skinny, sexually aroused tomato.

“What exactly are you saying?” he asks, slowly.

“C’moooon, man. You’re really going to make me say it? I’m asking if you’ll… you know…” Ruby resorts to air quotes. “‘ _Help me out_ ’. With my ‘ _problem_ ’.” It turns out it is horribly embarrassing to have to say things like this out loud. Really, this sort of thing is what sex ed should be actually about, because it turns out explaining this situation to another living human being, and trying to have an actual conversation about it, is monsterously hard. ”I’m going into heat, right, and pretty soon I’m going to be basically -” _begging for it_ “- nonsensical, and I figured I could either ride it out alone in my dorm room or check out one of those rooms at the student clinic and it’ll be awful like it always is, or I thought we could… that maybe you might want to, um, stay here, and we could - ”

“Yes,” he says quickly, interrupting her, almost tripping over himself to get the word out.

The feeling starts at the top of her head and washes down, warmth flooding through her body like sunlight. “Really?”

“If you’re saying what I think you’re saying, then Jesus fucking Christ, yes.”

“Are you sure?” Ruby asks again, because she really doesn’t want to coerce anybody, not even Billy, into having sex with her for several days straight out of a sense of, like, misplaced pity or something. “I know I’m not what every guy dreams of, and I know that the two of us, we’re not -”

“Shut up,” he says. “Ruby. You are…” He passes a hand over his eyes, scrubbing his face. He’s not breathing the clear air from the window anymore; his eyes are starting to go a bit funny again. “Yes. Yes, I’ll do it. I’ll stay here with you. Don’t ask anybody else.”

“I wasn’t going to ask anybody else, you weirdo.”

“Okay.” He steps back away from her again, back closer to the window, and takes a couple deep breaths, visibly steading himself.

“I have two conditions, though,” she says. 

“Seriously, Ruby,” Billy says, sounding pained, “you could ask me for anything right now, you could ask me to jump out of your fucking third story window and I’d say yes and leap like fucking Superman.”

“Uh. Nothing like that.”

“ _Anything_ ,” he repeats, with emphasis.

“Okay then.” She laughs, and tries not to sound nervous. “My first condition is that you can’t mate bite me. I mean, maybe that’s obvious, but, just, uh - don’t.” Ruby sneaks a look at Billy. “The second is - don’t make fun of me, okay? I’ve never been around another person when I’m in heat and the whole thing is embarrassing enough when I’m by myself. And I know I’m not...” She sweeps a hand down her body, figuring that they’re both on the same page as to that whole mess. “So please, just… be nice to me.”

A lot of expressions Ruby doesn’t really understand flash across Billy’s face in quick succession, and, yup, Ruby wants to melt into the ground and die and never ever have to have a discussion like this with another human being for the rest of her life.

“Have you had sex before?” he asks finally. It wasn’t the question Ruby was expecting, although maybe she should have been.

They say you shouldn’t let your first time be during heat, that there’s too much of a chance for trauma and a partner who wouldn’t be able to give you the thought or time you need. The official sex talks only give the basic outline of this as dry fact, but the whispers tell the rest of the story: find a partner and get it over with. Don’t lose your virginity during a heat, if you’re an omega. Don’t let an alpha be your first.

“I’ve had sex before,” Ruby says slowly. “In high school.”

His expression doesn’t really change. “That’s good.”

“During a heat?”

“No.”

“With an alpha?”

“No,” she says. “What about you? Have you had sex before?”

“Nope. Never, none of those situations.”

She would have 100% assumed the answer to that question would be yes, and hardly even worth asking, given the way he flirts, the way that he acts. She gapes at him, honestly surprised, and he continues, impatiently, “I mean, it’s not like I’ve never kissed somebody or whatever. But I’ve never done… that.”

This is really blowing out her image of Billy for some reason. “For real?”

“Yes.”

“You sure you know what to do?” Ruby winces; the question sounds super condescending as soon as she says it.

“Pretty sure I can figure it out.”

“Sorry. I didn’t mean that like it sounded.”

“I’m not embarrassed about it. Hey, look - I’ll make you a deal. I won’t make fun of you, and then you can’t make fun of me, okay? We’ll be in this together, and all that shit.”

“Are you suggesting a truce?”

“I’ll wave my little white flag if you’ll wave yours.” He mimes waving the tiniest little pretend flag between his fingers, and summons up the Billy Johnson patented aww-shucks smile in full force. Ruby hates how well it works on her.

“Come on, would I make fun of you?” she says, equivocating, trying to sound cool.

“You take the piss out of me all the time.”

“Only ‘cause you love it.” She lets a nice little beat of silence pass. “Your _little_ flag?”

“Big flag,” he says, deadpan. “Huge. Massive.”

“Ha ha,” she says.

He grins at her, for real this time, and she smiles back.

“I won’t… uh, mate bite you either,” he adds, a bit more awkwardly.

She thinks about making a joke, and decides against it. “Thanks.”

Silence fades into seriousness, and the reality of the situation hits Ruby, all at once. She knows what she’s like during heats. In a couple hours she’ll get desperate. She’ll start craving skin against her own skin, she’ll be drenched in slick and craving anything and everything: orgasms, stimulation, sex. She and Billy are going to fuck, they’re going to fuck like actual fucking animals, drunk on each other’s hormones and drowning in each other’s bodies. They’re going to fuck for _days_. It’s going to be the most intense experience of her life so far, and she’s going to share all of that with this person. With Billy.

Billy is breathing harder again now, like he can see everything she’s thinking on her face. Jesus, he can probably smell it on her.

“Do we -” he starts to say, and then, “I mean, do you have everything you need here?”

“I do. But we’ve got some time, so if you want to go home and grab anything you think you might need, go for it.”

“Right. I’ll do that, then.” But he doesn’t move an inch, just keeps staring at her. “Are you going to be okay while I’m not here?”

“I’ll fight ‘em off when you're gone,” she says, sweeping a hand around her empty room.

Billy breathes in again, shudders, then takes a couple steps closer to her, so that he’s standing in front of her. “I’ll be back,” he promises. “Don’t do anything. I’ll be back soon, I’m going to run to my apartment to get a change of clothing. And a toothbrush and... stuff. I’ll be back really soon.”

“You better.”

He’s close enough that she can smell him properly for the first time, and oh shit, she has a lot more sympathy for the distracted, desperate way he’s been acting this whole time, because Billy Johnson smells _good_. He normally smells good to her, but right now that’s kicked into overdrive. She wants to eat the taste of his skin; she wants to huff his scent and die of an overdose. Warm, fresh slick trickles down her legs, spotting her yoga pants, and fuck, _fuck_ , Ruby hates her omega body sometimes, shit like this is so embarrassing.

“Can I scent you?” Billy asks, abruptly. “Before I go?”

It’s a nothing-request compared to what they’re about to do together. But they’ve never been this close to each other before, or done something nearly so intimate. It feels big.

“Uh, okay,” she says, feeling a bit nervous about it.

He takes a step closer and leans in cautiously. She guesses he’ll lick the gland at her neck - that’s a pretty normal thing people do to scent each other, she used to do that with her boyfriend in high school sometimes. The effect with a beta wasn’t all that intense really, but it had always made her shiver pleasantly. 

But Billy nuzzles his cheek up gently against her own instead. His skin is stubbled and a bit scratchy. She can feel his breathing, warm in the shell of her ear. And then he shifts a bit and drags his neck purposefully against her own, scrapping both their scent glands against each other.

It’s an old fashioned move, not at all what she expected, and sort of European - because he’s Irish, maybe? Is that how that works? - but the thought dies fast, as both of their scents shift with the contact, mingling in a way Ruby’s never experienced, and around them a new universe composed of only the two of them comes into existence, pheromones and scent markers entangling together, heady and gorgeous.

Her knees lock and her head swims. Ruby’s pretty sure she whimpers; her whole body is flushed with the rightness of this. Her coming heat _sings_.

Billy moans, and rubs himself against her neck again, a little harder.

“Oh fucking Christ,” Billy says, yanking himself back from her. He somehow manages to take a step away, and then another. He’s staring at her. “ _Ruby_.”

And he turns, and he’s gone.


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you again to my wonderful beta reader htbthomas!

Billy comes back an hour or so later with two changes of clothes, his toothbrush, a jar of salted peanuts, and a shit ton of condoms.

“I don’t know why it’s so gross that the only food you brought with you is peanuts, but it totally is,” Ruby manages to say in something like her normal tone, even though the time Billy was gone really did a number on her. Her whole body is aching, a distant, thrumming that has settled into her bones and the hollow places of her body. She’d taken another round of painkillers, which helped with the hurt but did nothing for the want seeping into her, the hormones flooding her body. She doesn’t dare take another dose of heat suppressant. She feels drunk, like she’s about to tumble down a whole flight of stairs and laugh her ass off at the bottom.

Billy’s hugging the wall, avoiding her like she’s a wild animal, sidling around her room towards the window she’d kept open in his absence. They’re going to need to close the window soon - it’s freezing outside and the ancient heating system in her room is rattling like a teapot in a valiant attempt to raise the temperature inside and slowly failing - but Ruby had thought that flushing out her scent as much as possible before bottling the two of them up together would help give them both the ability to talk a little bit more before things. She’s trying, she’s really trying.

“Salt and fat,” Billy says, and Ruby stares at him, confused, before remembering what they’d been talking about. Right, peanuts.

“Peanuts,” she agrees. Then, because she’s been rehearsing this, because she realized she’d forgotten to share an important fact when they’d been talking before, she blurts out, “I’m on birth control.”

Billy nods like the non-sequitur makes perfect sense. Their conversation is really going great, she’s so glad she kept her room freezing cold for this. Fantastic.

“Cool,” he says. “I think I’m going into rut.”

Oh, right right right. “Have you ever - ?” she starts to ask, but he shakes his head and bounces his leg up and down.

“No, I haven’t, but I can’t think what else it would be. I really want to have sex. With you. I can’t stop thinking about you. It’s really - overwhelming. That’s got to be what this is. I jerked off before coming back over here.” It makes sense that he’s telling her this right now, it makes perfect, amazing sense that he masturbated before heading back here in the first place. He’s so smart.

“Smart,” she says. “That was a super smart move, Billy.”

“I definitely did it because I’m smart.”

She laughs, a for-real laugh. Billy smiles too, but his eyes are glittering and feverish. He’s watching her in a way she doesn’t completely understand, even with the way her own body is melting down.

“And you bought back peanuts. And, like, a _lot_ of condoms.”

“I’m the smartest guy you know.”

“Why else would I ask you to do this with me?”

“I lied just now,” he says, instead. “I jerked off twice before coming back, not just once. I tried so hard not to knot the second time, but I thought about you when I came and then I had to sit in the car until my knot went down enough that I could walk back up here, which is why it took me so long to get back.”

It’s so surreal hearing him talk about sex. Like they always had conversations like this.

“Right,” she says, nodding. “Of course.”

“Yeah,” he agrees, completely distracted, not even listening to the words. He’s staring at her mouth.

“Is this weird?” she asks. They’re both acting completely weird, right? She doesn’t normally interact with people when she’s this close to heat, she knows she’s not making a lot of sense, and Billy’s just _staring_ at her now, which isn’t helping either. The idea of them going from being two fully clothed, normal, hey-buddy-what’s-up friends to the proposed end result - porn-y and naked, sweating skin and both of them gasping and undone - seems so far away that it might as well be another planet.

“It is weird,” he agrees. He’s still bouncing his leg, nervous energy skittering through him. “I think it would be less weird if you kissed me, though.”

“What?” Ruby asks blankly, like somehow this is the part of the conversation she doesn’t really get, like this is the one suggestion out of this whole ridiculous day that doesn’t really register.

“You should kiss me.”

“Why do I have to be the one to kiss you?”

“Because I don’t trust -” He breaks off. “ _Please_ , Ruby. Please kiss me.” 

Kissing is total weak sauce compared to what they’ll be doing soon, but she guesses he’s right, they have to start somewhere.

She walks to where he’s plastered back against a wall and tries not to die when she gets a hit of his scent again. He smells even better than he did last time, which is saying something: it must be the rut kicking in, putting his pheromone production into overdrive, his body trying desperately to send reciprocal signals out to Ruby. Her body goes hot and cold, and slick, the bane of her life, pools inside of her, trickling down her inner thighs.

Billy looks like he’s trying to disappear backwards into the wall. His eyes are almost black now.

“Okay, I’m going to kiss you now,” she announces, formally and too loudly, and it’s so, _so_ awkward. But she can’t think what else to say, and Billy isn’t helping her at all. Alphas are usually take-charge types: Ruby hates both the stereotype and reality of that fact, but Billy’s current reticence is also not helping them right now.

She goes up onto her tiptoes, and, surprisingly, there’s no hesitation on his part: there’s a gentle skip forward in time, and then he’s kissing her ( _thank god_ ) and she’s kissing him back, like it’s something they’ve always done. Billy’s tongue skims into her mouth, and Ruby, for one clear, lovely second, remembers just how much she likes kissing: the simple, physical act of touching her own mouth against another’s.

Her heat slams back into her a moment later, and the clear, pleasant moment dissipates. The same unfocused feelings of desperation bubble back up inside of her, crowding her thoughts again, because, god, _god_ , the taste of him is _amazing_. She can’t believe she didn’t see this coming, with how good he smells. His taste and his scent surround her and soak into her and fill up her mind and -

Billy’s hands flit down to her waist and pop back up again, like he’s not quite sure where he’s allowed to touch her yet. He makes a noise like a whimper.

Ruby pulls back, concerned, but he slams his mouth back into hers immediately, knocking their noses together in his haste. Billy swings the two of them around, putting Ruby’s back against the wall, and she’s legitimately surprised for a half-second.

He pulls back, staring down at her; his eyes are crazy dilated. “I can’t believe I’m going to have sex with you.”

The _with you_ part of that sentiment, Ruby figures distantly, is probably incidental to the main _going to have sex_ part for Billy. The thought stings, unexpected and sharp - stupid omega instincts finding the idea that he didn’t choose her unsatisfying and wrong, even when she was the one who asked him. When this was her idea in the first place.

She goes up on tiptoes to kiss him again, trying to shake the discontent out of her mind, chasing oblivion with how phenomenal Billy tastes, how ridiculously, stunningly compatible the two of them seem to be. Billy leans into her body and, not that Ruby was really thinking he _didn’t_ have an erection with the way he’s acting, but yeah, that’s absolutely an erection pressed up against her stomach. She hitches herself closer to Billy.

Billy’s fingers scrape against the scent glands at her neck, pressing against the skin there, cupping her face. Something wild and desperate ignites within Ruby at the pressure on her glands.

Billy is making frantic noises in her mouth. The universe of their combined scents swims around them, little bursts and pops of chemistry, floating and flickering and settling in their veins. She’s so turned on right now, her body flooding with hormones and approval. It’s fantastic, it’s better than fantastic, her body is melting down with sirens going off, _horny_ , _horny_ , _you are so horny_.

She can’t believe all they’ve done is make out so far. She doesn’t understand how anything they could do from this point on could be more intense: her head is spinning, her knees are weak, everything inside of her a glorious riot, from just kissing him.

“Please,” she manages to say, and when she looks down her hands are undoing the belt around Billy’s waist. “Please.”

Billy looks overwhelmed, his ears bright red, and mouth slack and wet. “Okay,” he breathes. “Are you okay? Is everything okay so far?”

“Yes,” she says. “Help me.”

He unbuttons his jeans after she finally gets the buckle of his belt undone. Billy pushes his pants down, hopping to get them off past his ankles, then strips off his shirt. He’s wearing blue boxers a light check pattern, his erection aggressively denting the fabric. His chest is very pale. The ginger hairs on his arms and legs stand up in chilled goosebumps, making him look faintly like a skinny, red-ish, extremely aroused porcupine.

She wants to laugh, the drunk feeling bubbling up inside of her, and thinks, _it is cold in here_. They really should close the window.

She yanks off her own shirt. She’d normally be nervous about taking her clothes off for the first time - her situation with slick is going to be embarrassingly obvious once she takes off her pants, and she doesn't like being topless in front of other people - but it doesn’t seem to matter right now. Her normal are inhibitions smothered and subdued under the heavy pulse pounding in her veins. Her nipples are hard in her cold room, pulsing and tight. She twists her arms around her back to get her bra off, and latches herself onto Billy’s front, kissing him hard, covering her nakedness with his.

He doesn’t try to cop a feel, like she was thinking he might. He winds his arms around her torso instead and starts walking her back toward the bed, making out with her desperately, hunched over to kiss her as they stumble in the same direction.

The back of Ruby’s knees hit the edge of her bed. She pushes her fingers under the fabric against her hips to shove her yoga pants down. Her cotton underwear is completely soaked. Her bare thighs slide against each other now that her pants are off, slippery and wet.

“Wait. _Condom_ ,” Billy says, yanking his head up, eyes wide with almost comical panic.

He takes a couple half-steps back away from her, then turns to basically sprint for the other side of the room, where he’d dropped his stuff when he first arrived. Ruby wraps her arms awkwardly around her torso, covering her stomach, watching him. Billy grabs a box of condoms and rips the cardboard, then pushes his boxers down unceremoniously. His cock springs up, thick and jutting and very erect.

Ruby’s mouth goes dry.

“Do we actually need a condom?” she asks then, tasting the words as they come out of her mouth, vaguely feeling that what she’s suggesting is wrong. But her mind is fogging up, her heat painting her instincts. She can’t stop looking at Billy’s dick.

“Yes,” he says without looking up, trying to tear the packet open and failing so far. His hands seem to be shaking.

“I’m on birth control,” she repeats. Her body clenches down on nothing, fresh slick painting her naked thighs, just thinking about it. She’s never had sex without a condom - the couple times she’d had sex before she’d been insistent, obnoxiously so, about her boyfriend wearing a condom, terrified of resembling anything at all close to the term _teen pregnancy_ \- but right now she doesn’t care, she wants this so badly, she _wants_.

Billy’s eyes are glassy. She can smell his scent: sharp and wanting and something uncontrolled. “Fuck, Ruby.” He takes an unsteady breath. “We can’t. We - we need to talk about this later.”

“Why?”

“Because I can’t think - I don’t - I can’t think right now.”

He finishes ripping the condom packet with his teeth, and says, “Help me,” and so Ruby gets her hands on Billy’s dick for the first time. It’s great, even if it’s to roll a dumb little sheet of latex over his overheated skin. Billy hisses as she works her hands down, working the condom down to the base of his cock where his knot will be. The skin at the base is already gently swollen, probably from him masturbating earlier.

The pain of heat is seeping through the lust, and it’s making her desperate. She doesn’t know how long she’s got before she goes nuclear, but it isn’t going to be long now. Some distant, more rational, part of her innately feels that this is already too fast, but she doesn’t know how to stop what’s happening, and isn’t sure she could if she tried. Her body feels distant from her, as though it were no longer wholly her own.

“Come on, come on, _come on_ ,” she says, and pulls him back to her bed again. He lands on top of her, heavier than she would have guessed.

Billy kisses her again, then reaches down between her legs, and touches her, tentatively and very gently.

“Do you want me to finger you? Or go down on you first?” He chokes a bit on the words _go down on you_ , a strange intensity to his voice. The pad of his finger is hovering just over her clit. Ruby thinks at first that’s because he might not want to do what he’s asking, but it occurs to her, looking at his flushed face, that it’s quite the opposite: he seems to really, legitimately want to eat her out.

“Uh. Maybe later?” she says, and hooks her legs around the back of his knees, tugging him forward. She’s never had somebody go down on her, but. “I think I’d rather have sex first.”

“I can… um… did you want me to knot you?”

Ruby laughs, a bit wildly. “Yes,” she says. “Yes. Please knot me.”

“Jesus,” he whispers. His eyes are wild and drunk. He scrambles up against her body, trying to find some sort of purchase, then drops his hand back down between them. He grabs his dick in his fist this time, trying awkwardly and blindly to figure out what he needs to do.

He manages after some trial and error to get the tip of his dick next to her vagina, and they both freeze. All the muscles in Billy’s body go taut. Then the moment connects, and he pushes up into her, all at once, a bit too fast and a bit too sudden. He’s big, and the stretch of it - of _him_ \- stings for a long moment, even with how slick she is. But Ruby’s heat contracts and expands around her, and something inside of her settles, calms. The feeling of it runs warmly down, all the way to her toes and the tips of her fingers.

Billy is practically vibrating out of his skin, holding himself extremely and painfully still.

“Oh shit,” Billy says, panicked. “Ruby, I’m going to -”

He pulls back, completely out of her, frantic, and convulses.

Ruby tries to yank Billy forward again, but his knot is starting to swell - outside of her, Ruby wants to die, this isn’t what her body wants - and they bump together awkwardly instead, Ruby’s body clenching down on empty air, slick dripping and cooling rapidly on her skin.

“Motherfucker,” Billy breathes, and presses back up inside of her, partially.

Ruby whines, too keyed up to really understand what’s happening yet, Billy’s dick only half way inside of her, his knot tapping up against the outside of her cunt, prohibitively large. There’s no way, she thinks in a disconnected, surreal daze, that he’s shoving that whole thing up inside of her now. 

Panic flaps in her chest. Unresolved hormones skitter through her thoughts. She’s teetering on the edge of a cliff: the headachy, hollow, painful feeling of unfulfilled heat beating in her veins.

“Billy,” she gasps.

“Sorry.” He mumbles the word against her neck. “Sorry. You’re just so pretty.”

“I -” Ruby can’t even form words.

“You feel so good, you felt so fucking good, I couldn’t help myself, god, I like you so fucking much.” He shoves a hand down awkwardly between them, fingers slipping through her slick, brushing up against her clit. Ruby jolts and stiffens.

Billy keeps talking.

She really doesn’t touch her clit much when she’s in heat. Her clitoris is over-sensitive and swollen from hormones at this time, and it isn’t what her body wants, unlike the entire rest of her life: the heat cycle is a breeding instinct, and she tends to orgasm via penetration during heats. But Billy is murmuring in her ear, and Ruby’s omega instincts are eating it up, just _dying_ at the praise, his scent is wrapped all around her, and while he’s only partly inside of her he’s still hard, stretching her out. So when he swipes clumsily, aiming in the general direction of her clit, it actually works - the tension inside of her breaks, and she comes, her vision whiting gloriously out, the ache inside of her shifting and easing.

Billy groans as she comes; his knot isn’t inside of her, but the part of his dick that is pulses a little, and she realizes that he’s probably still orgasming (or maybe he’s orgasming a second time?). Alphas have longer than normal orgasms and pretty amazing refractory periods during rut, she knows that, but apparently Ruby’s never really thought about what that actually _means_. And Billy - well. Billy just had sex for the first time. He is, she realizes in a weirdly clear moment of sudden insight, probably pretty out of his mind right now.

She drifts on his scent, her body still shivering, and it isn’t enough - it isn’t all her body wants, it isn’t what she craves - but it’s still better than masturbating all alone in her room. She wouldn’t even know to want more if Billy wasn’t here.

Ruby winds her fingers in his hair to pull him closer, digs her nose into the gland just behind his ear, and lets both of them ride it out.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If you have a minute and you’d like to, please feel free to let me know what you think or just say hi! I really appreciate any and all feedback. ♥


	4. Chapter 4

Ruby gets up to close the window, stomping her feet in the cold of the room, and tries to slide back under the blankets as quickly as possible.

Billy’s distracted, dealing with the condom (a total mess, clearly not designed for alphas in rut no matter what the marketing on the box says) and his knot (also a mess, and not going away). He’s flushed pink all the way up to his ears. She’s pretty sure he’s embarrassed about what just happened, and she doesn’t know what to say or do to make that better. The fact that the first and only person she’s ever slept with during a heat is avoiding looking her in the eyes after sex is making her stupid hormonal, hyped-up, heat-soaked instincts blare that something is _wrong_.

Ruby pulls the sheet up over her chest, the temporary clarity gained from orgasming just enough to make her feel awkward and weird about not wearing any clothes, which is super ironic, really.

Billy slips back into bed next to her. It’s easier when he’s covered up and not balls-to-the-walls naked and sporting an intimidating and yet also vaguely ridiculous knot/erection combo that won’t go away for… Ruby isn’t sure how long. Fifteen minutes? Half an hour? Everything she’s ever read has only talked vaguely about the part of heat sex where you’re knotted together, but she can’t remember an exact amount of time and Ruby is thinking that’s really a failing of sex ed and porn as a genre right now.

It’s surreal to think that the whole apparatus sticking out from his body is supposed to be locked inside her right now, that they’re supposed to be stuck together like two modules in the space station and having a form of continued pseudo-sex and, like, worshipfully tracing each other’s faces in a post-orgasmic mutual haze or something. Instead, they’re mutually awkward, staring silently at the ceiling. One of them definitely still has a huge boner. Great.

She can’t stop thinking about it. They had _sex_. She just had sex with _Billy Johnson_. But also -

“Well,” Billy says briskly, and twists about to face her. “That went a bit tits up, didn’t it?”

Ruby feels a light-headed rush of relief, and Billy smiles at her.

“I mean, I wasn’t exactly being completely helpful,” she says, almost giddy with it. She likes him so much, it’s embarrassing. She doesn’t even think it’s completely the heat or her hormones talking.

“I jerked off twice before coming back and I still only lasted, like, two seconds.”

“I’m the one out of the two of us who’s had sex before and I was just lying there. Like a dead fish or something! It was like my brain wasn’t working.”

“You were just so...” He trails off. “So…” His eyes are getting that distant, glassy look again. “Christ, Ruby.”

“You know… hey.” She pokes him in the shoulder. “Hey. Billy. That was the best sex I’ve had.” She feels a little weird admitting it, because, yeah, she knows the sex really wasn’t at all top of the barrel, cosmically speaking - but the other sex she’s had wasn’t all that great, either. And it seems like something she could tell Billy, instead of watching him eat shit for something that was actually pretty good for her.

Billy frowns, pulling back from her a bit. “Are you having me on?”

“No. No!”

“You don’t need to say that just to make me feel better, you know.”

“I’m not messing with you. Seriously.”

“Come on.” He flashes a grin at her, that easy huckster’s charm sliding over his face. “My ego can take it.”

“Look. I’ve only had sex a couple times before this, with my boyfriend in high school, okay? And I liked it, but it was also a lot more... awkward. While we would have sex all I would think about how fundamentally strange it was that we were having sex. And how stupid human bodies are. And, like, the weird noises you make? It wasn’t anything like - what just happened.”

Billy’s smile fades as he considers her.

“I’ve only taken my bra off one time before during sex,” she concludes, lamely. She really doesn’t know how to explain what she’s trying to say at this point, but somehow that one humiliating fact must bring it all together, because a strange sort of understanding flickers across Billy’s face.

Ruby feels suddenly very, very exposed. She is excruciatingly aware of the blanket pulled up over her naked body, tucked just under her chin, hiding her body.

The light from outside is slowly fading; Ruby has a desk lamp next to her computer monitor, throwing shadows around the room. The heating system kicks off above their heads, white noise and the faint mechanical clank of industrial strength fans whirring to life, trying to warm her freezing cold room back up.

“It was the best sex I’ve ever had, too,” he says, finally. He sounds very serious about it, his voice low and earnest, considering what a useless, nothing statement that is for him to make.

Ruby rolls her eyes. “It was the only sex you’ve ever had.”

“It was, though. It was great. It was better than great. It was fucking fantastic.”

Ruby remembers the nonsensical things he’d whispered in her ear after he’d come inside of her. _You’re so pretty. I couldn’t help myself. I like you so fucking much._

And she finds herself, amazingly, starting to blush.

“I wanted to drown myself in you and not come back up for air.”

“Ridiculous,” she says, face hot, trying to ward off his weird intensity. “It’s biology. You’re in rut.” But desire tightens again, warm in her stomach.

“It’s biology for you, too. It doesn’t make it less true. Everything is biology at a certain point, if you think about it. The fact that we are two sentient beings talking to each other right now is biology. The fact that I have a distinct identity and you have a distinct identity and we definitely just had mind blowing albeit extremely short sex is biology. The fact that -”

Ruby closes the gap between them to kiss him, cutting him off. He grabs the nape of her neck to pull her closer, and kisses her back without hesitation.

His erection, still hard, floating somewhere out in space in advance of the rest of his body, bumps up against her stomach, underneath the blanket. The head of his cock presses suddenly against her belly button, sticky and very much _there_.

He freezes, tensing. Then he rolls his body back away from her again, and throws a forearm up over his eyes.

“So, uh, did you want to have sex again?” she asks, mouth dry.

He groans, his arm still over his eyes. “Yes. Fuck, yes, of course I do, but if I don’t get this bloody knot down I won’t be able to - _fuck_.” 

“You won’t be able to fuck?”

“Very funny.”

She reaches out, tentatively, for the general tented area of the bedspread, and brushes her hand out blindly. Billy jolts, and shifts away from her a bit more.

“Seriously, Ruby.”

“Why do you need to wait? You’re still hard. Let’s have sex again,” she says, and it all makes sense to her as she says it, the whole plan is so clear and obvious and easy. Her heart is beating like a drum. She can’t believe how fast she wants it again.

“I want to, you have no idea. But if we have sex right now, I’ll only be able to stick like 75% of my dick inside of you.”

She doesn’t care. She knows what he feels like inside of her, how he tastes in her mouth. “We could make that work.”

“I would - I really want to have sex with you again, and I _really_ want to try to actually knot you this time. It’s hard to think about anything else. It’s…” He takes a deep breath and lets it out, unsteady. “I don’t think I can -” He breaks off. “ _Fuck_.” His hand is fisted up in the sheets, the knuckles white.

Ruby tries to lick her lips; her thighs are wet again, slick trapped between her legs underneath the blanket. “Do you want to try going down on me instead, like you said?”

“ _Yes._ No. That would be - _shit_. I don’t think that would help me out right now either.”

“It would help me out.”

“I’m so turned on right now I’d probably end up trying to hump the bed into oblivion, and then we’d be in the exact same situation we are now, just with grosser sheets.”

“But also more orgasms.”

“You’re killin’ me, Dixie.”

“Maybe I want to kill you,” Ruby says, hoarsely, and there must be more than she thought in her voice because Billy drops his arm to stare at her.

“I do want to go down on you.” He laughs, hollowly. “ _Want_ doesn’t cut it. I want to do so many things to you.”

“I’ve never had anybody go down on me.” She wonders if he hears the implicit _you would be the first_ underneath her words.

“Oh, Christ.” He squeezes his eyes shut again. “I can’t talk about this right now. I just can’t.”

There’s a long silence, broken only by Billy’s harsh breathing. Ruby sneaks a hand underneath the blanket, and brushes her fingers against her vagina. She’s soaked. Billy’s ignoring her right now, probably thinking valiant thoughts about sports or his mom or whatever sorts of things guys try to think about when they think they’re being noble and chasing thoughts of sex out of their brain.

She slips a finger down against herself, and bites back a moan. She needs to be quiet doing this.

“Distract me?” he asks. “Please? We could talk about something boring, and then maybe this goddamn knot goes down sooner.”

Ruby circles her clit, once, twice, then twists her wrist to push two fingers into her cunt. She is so _wet_. She’s fantastic at this, she is a masturbation ninja, she is an expert bringing a lifetime’s worth of skill and knowledge to her work. She clears her throat and tries to sound normal. “When am _I_ ever boring?”

“Please.”

“Fine.” She presses her thumb up against her clit: not moving it, just a nice, steady pressure. What’s boring, what’s really - “Do you have to do paperwork to get the next couple days excused?”

He fidgets, and Ruby thinks for one moment that he won’t be able to cut through his own haze to answer her question. “I filed for an absence from my classes before I came back here,” he says, finally. “It’s only provisionally accepted, though. I gave them your name and you’ll have to verify the form at some point before everything’s official.”

Ruby lets her thumb drag slowly downward, trying to keep herself on the edge, trying to keep herself calm enough to still be talking to Billy. “So how does that work? Do alphas get to basically skip class whenever, you just have to be, like, _yeah, dude, I’m totally having sex with this omega for the next couple days, peace out_ , and the system gives you a get out of jail free card?”

“I mean, you do have to co-sign my paperwork. And I was told alphas are limited to three heat passes every academic school year.”

“And yet we registered omegas only have two heats a year. Curiouser and curiouser.”

“I assume that’s to cover if you, I don’t know, break up with somebody and then the next person you date is on a different schedule? That’s all I’ve got.”

“All I’m hearing is yet another example of systemic alpha privilege.”

Billy laughs, and she thinks it’s a real laugh, despite the strain in it. “Alphas are the worst.”

“At least we agree on one thing.” Three fingers. Ruby fights the urge to let her eyes roll back in her head, fights the urge to squirm and rock. She raises her knees up to create a hollow space under the blanket, hiding the motion of her hand. “It’s kind of weird, when you think about it, that the school knows we’re doing this,” she says.

“That the venerated institution responsible for our career prospects and future life path knows we’re having sex?”

She’s hollow and aching, the fever of heat starting to wipe out her other thoughts. She would give her left arm for her vibrator right now. This was a losing game, she should never have started it, and she doesn’t know how long she can keep it up before Billy figures out what she’s doing. She’s not sure she can orgasm like this anyway. Heats mess up her normal masturbation game like nothing else.

“Yeah.” She lets her voice slip down low and husky, lets some of what she’s doing to herself curl its way into her speech. “It’s all documented - the most boring paperwork you can imagine. Billy Johnson and Ruby Dixie: fucking each other’s brains out. It’s part of our _permanent record_.”

She whispers the last two words, savoring them, letting them roll around in her mouth. Ruby shifts her fingers, and a moan catches in her throat she can’t suppress. 

Billy’s eyes go hilariously wide at that, and he jolts up to sitting.

“Wait. Wait a hot second. Are you _masturbating_?”

Ruby freezes, buried inside herself up to the knuckle. “Uh. No?”

Billy stares down at her. His nostrils flare, and Ruby is pretty sure then that he can smell how turned on she is, and, oh boy, yeah, she did not think this one through.

“You are masturbating!” His expression is undergoing rapid shifts between disbelief and lust and a pearl-clutching, gap-mouthed outrage.

“I’m in _heat_!” she snaps. “What did you think was going to happen here?”

“You’ve got to be kidding me.”

“I was trying to -” she starts, but he rolls on top of her, taking the covers over with him, and kisses her hard instead.

“Mmmphhhhh,” Ruby says eloquently, because Billy’s taking out his immense frustration with his tongue in her mouth. Lust, red and heavy, swims around her. The extraordinary taste of him explodes in her mouth again, stunning in its sheer rightness.

She still has her fingers wedged up inside of her vagina, her hand smashed down and pinned by Billy’s weight on top of her. Ruby cautiously attempts to yank her hand away, trying to de-finger herself, and ends up smacking her wrist back against Billy’s boner instead.

It’s a slapstick comedy of errors up in here, except she moans and Billy moans and he grabs a condom from off the edge of the bed and rips it open with his teeth, and the mood shifts fast.

“You know, I said earlier you could fuck me without the condom,” she tries offering again. Her hips keep moving, she can’t keep herself still, can’t think about anything except how good he’s going to feel inside of her.

He doesn’t say anything to that, just twists his body around to get at his dick enough to roll the condom down. He’s still swollen at the base of his cock, his knot half-inflated, so the condom only makes it down the first part of his dick or so. It doesn’t seem quite right, but she’s also never seen a condom on a banana with a round orange or whatever strapped the base, so it’s hard to really gauge.

“Seriously, Billy, you can -”

Billy just slaps a hand over her mouth, straight up, and Ruby is both kind of insulted and really turned on. Blood contracts and expands underneath her skin. Her scent glands grow hot and heavy: at the thin inner skin of her wrists and neck, at the top of her back.

She bites the center of his palm. He jerks back.

“Hey!”

“Don’t try to shut me up by putting a hand over my mouth!”

“Stop trying to get me to fuck you bare right before we have actual sex,” he snaps back. “This is hard enough as it is. I’m trying to be a good person, okay.”

She kisses him again, angrier this time, and Billy kisses her back and slips a hand down between them. He grabs his dick, coating the condom with the slick from his fingers, then places a hand flat against her abdomen and shifts his hips to press up into her, the partial knot still large enough to bump up against the outside of her cunt, limiting his range of motion, like before. Billy drops his head to her neck, fucking her shallowly.

And Ruby knows it’s completely and utterly unfair, because this is what Billy was trying to avoid, but frustration, real frustration, builds in her as he does. She wants him _deeper_. He’s supposed to be _fucking_ her.

“Ruby. Ruby, Ruby, Ruby. You have to relax.” He thrusts futility up into her a couple more times. “Relax.”

“You relax,” she mumbles back meanly, and what, okay, she knows it doesn’t make any sense. Her thoughts float like flashes of light, there and gone, little defiant, annoyed stars in a dim night sky.

“Okay,” he says vaguely. “Okay then.”

He kisses her, sweetly this time. His mouth is drugged and soft, and Ruby lets herself sink past her dissatisfaction into his scent and taste, letting it envelop her and pull her under. He trails his mouth down her throat. She can feel his cock a bit twitching inside of her as he holds himself still, and it makes her want to die a little, how eager he is for it. He kisses the line of her neck one more time, and mumbles something against her skin that she can’t make out.

And he _bites_ the gland under her ear.

Ruby goes instantly weak - her vision swims, her mind whites out. It’s so _good_ to Ruby, the bite mingling their scents together. It’s so much more intense than when he scented her a couple hours before. He licks where he’d just bitten, mindlessly, and they both groan. She wonders, sluggishly, if she’s bleeding, if he’s broken her skin on her neck the same as a real mating bite would do on her back.

She wraps her legs back up around him on sheer instinct, and he whispers, “Relax,” one more time in her ear and thrusts.

Ruby stops breathing, her body going rigid, but it works: he drives his partial knot up into her, grinding until it’s settled snugly up inside of her. The sensation is terrifying and exhilarating, both too much all at once and exactly what her body had been craving.

Billy freezes.

“Are you okay?” There’s a great, wild strain in his voice.

“You’re… big,” Ruby manages to say. She squirms a bit, hooked to him. She tries to breathe through her nose.

Billy’s eyes are glazed, his jaw tense. “It’s going to get bigger,” he says, finally. “It’s going to get bigger when I knot again for real.”

Oh fuck.

Ruby shifts again, almost desperately, trying to make room inside herself. Her little hip motions clench her cunt around him, little ripples and spasms of muscle that she can _feel_ because of how tightly they’re pressed together. Slick drips down from where he’s inside of her, pooling and running in little rivulets down her ass and thighs, smearing the sheet underneath her.

He drops his forehead against her shoulder and rolls it fitfully back and forth against her, like he’s in pain.

“Ruby?”

“Hold... still,” Ruby says. The words taste weird in her mouth; her thoughts are starting to slur.

It takes a while, but the pressure inside of Ruby eventually seems more bearable, some of the tension draining away as her body gets used to the imposition. And Billy must sense that, because he buries his nose just behind her ear then, nuzzling at her bitten, swollen gland, and, experimentally, moves his hips.

It goes about as well as it’s going to - he still can’t really thrust like he would if they were having normal sex, so he’s not very deep inside of her, but his partial knot shifts and both of their breaths catch. He tries again, more firmly this time. The pressure shifts upward, pressing up somewhere inside of her, and an ache like a bruise blossoms magnificently inside of her, cascading outward, and Ruby’s whole body _keens_.

“Oh god,” she gasps. “Oh my god.” Billy is open mouthed against her skin as he begins to fuck her in earnest, grinding up against her more than anything else, shoving himself up inside of her as far as he can go. Ruby’s hands scramble, plucking fitfully at the sheets.

Ruby’s mind is spiraling, falling backwards through space and time, as her first orgasm hits, uncoiling through her skin and muscles and bone, shaking everything inside of her. Her whole body is radiant, exultant, transformed.

She’s dimly aware of Billy - they’re kissing, he’s kissing her, and then he tenses and makes this broken, needy sound, and buries himself one final time deep inside of her cunt, and everything around her goes dim and dark and blinding and his knot swells up even fatter inside of her.

The relief is sweet: her heat breaks in waves as he knots fully inside of her, pressure building and expanding. Orgasm blooms from her abdomen out through the rest of her body, curling her toes, fizzing through her nerves.

He practically punches the mattress next to her head. “Fuck. _Fuck_ , that’s good. Oh my god, Ruby, can you feel how good that is.”

It is the first time in her entire life where the reality of sex is hotter than the fantasy. Ruby _gets_ it now. She is an addict, she is spiraling, she is going to live on nothing more than hormones and orgasms and the way that Billy sounds in her ear when he comes for the rest of her life. She thinks about trying to tell Billy that, but words escape her, and then she is coming again, and the world drifts away with her into black.

*

“Hey. Are you comfortable?” Billy asks, after a while.

He’s on top of her, the two of them still locked together, but even with him taking some of his weight on his elbows, he’s heavy. Ruby’s thighs are starting to ache from the press of his hips between her legs.

“Sort of,” she says. Her voice is hoarse. It’s the first words she’s said in - she doesn’t know how long. “I could move.”

“Okay. Let’s roll. To the left, yeah? One, two…”

Billy scoops an arm underneath her torso and they both heave themselves sideways, rolling Billy onto his back with Ruby on top, straddling him. She keeps herself plastered to his chest.

Billy traces a lazy hand up and down her spine as she readjusts, his other hand curling over her hip, casually possessive. There’s a great, vast sense of contentment radiating off of Billy, as though he’d finally achieved his life’s purpose by knotting himself inside some omega and orgasming a couple times, and could now afford to let the entire rest of his adult life come at him how it would.

Ruby props herself up on her elbows to peer down at Billy, so she’s still otherwise pressed up close to his torso. He smiles up at her, a bit loopy.

“I love your freckles,” he says, and reaches up to swipe a thumb across her cheek. It’s dim enough that the light is washing both of them out, so close together.

“Moles,” she says.

“Beauty marks.”

“Sun spots.”

“Angel kisses.”

“Blemishes.”

Billy thickens his Irish accent, and she can see him almost physically crank up the charm, it’s so painful. “Stars on the constellations of your skin.”

Ruby tries to hide the little pleased shiver his compliments dredge up in her. He drops his hands to circle her wrists with his fingers, and brushes his thumbs against the scent glands there, back and forth over the sensitive skin. It’s a sweet gesture - innocent, like a bonded pair might do in public.

All of this casual, reverent touching is really doing her in. Ruby thinks she could more easily handle the overwhelming intimacy of what just happened if not for the way Billy keeps running his hands over her body.

“Hey, so,” Ruby says, and clears her throat. “I wanted to ask… when you, uh, bit me? Was I bleeding?”

“No. Well, not anymore.” The pale skin of his cheeks goes pink. “But you were, yeah. Sorry about that.”

Ruby cautiously touches her neck. “I can’t believe you actually bit me.”

Biting is a thing, she knows it’s a thing, but her boyfriend in high school had never been into it - betas usually aren’t, as far as she’s ever heard or read - so she’d just never quite imagined it would be so… _sexual_. Out of all the things you might do while having sex with somebody during your heat, she’d assumed biting was at the bottom of the list: necessary for mate bites, but also sort of unsexy and toddlers-running-around-with-germy-mouths adjacent.

“Sorry,” he says again, and goes even redder, like that’s somehow possible. “I couldn’t think what to do, and it was - fucking Christ, it’s so hard to think when you’re like that.”

“Don’t be sorry,” she says, slowly, still touching her own neck. “It was hot.”

Billy’s hand flexes against her hip. “Yeah?”

“Of course it was hot. Stupid hot. You know it was.” Just thinking about it makes her feel lightheaded again, the memory of the combination of both of their scents and pheromones exploding gloriously through her body. “You could bite me like that again, if you want to.”

He reaches a hand up to trace a slow little line down from her ear, across sensitive flesh, and they both shiver.

“I don’t know if I should. It’s all red and swollen, now.”

Ruby bares the other side of her neck. “There’s the other one.”

“Yeah,” he says, staring at her. “Yeah, okay. Maybe I will, at some point.”

He skims both hands up her torso, his thumbs brushing up against the sides of her breasts, continuing his lazy exploration of her body. It tickles a little, just enough to make her squirm where he’s still stretching her out and knotted inside her, wiggling herself around as much as her limited range of motion allows. Billy makes a soft, hoarse noise, and Ruby stills.

“Sorry,” she says.

“It’s fine,” he says, tightly. He takes a sharp breath in, then: “You could do that to me, too.”

She stares blankly down at him. “Do what?”

“You could bite me.”

She looks down at him, his red hair falling back against the pillow, looking up at her very seriously.

“Okay,” she says, and her heart starts beating faster again. “Maybe I will, too.”

*

It takes a while, but eventually his knot goes down enough that she can move herself off of him, both of them avoiding each other’s eyes with the awkwardness and intimacy of it all as they pull apart. It’s night outside now, the street lamp outside her window glowing yellow in the darkness. Little spots of snow dust and drift in the air. Ruby’s little dorm room is pleasantly warm now, and smells overwhelmingly, ridiculously, like sex.

Billy disappears into the bathroom. Ruby sits up, swings her legs over the edge of the bed, and starts to work finger-brushing some of the worst knots out of her hair. She’s feeling her way through one particularly tangled bit when Billy comes back out holding a washcloth, then stops, silhouetted in the doorway, to stare at her.

“What?” she asks, when he doesn’t say anything for a couple long seconds. She looks around the room, like maybe she’s not the thing that Billy’s fixated on, like maybe there’s a whole brand new topic of conversation hidden just behind her. “Is something wrong?”

“No.” He walks, naked, over to the bed to sit down next to her. “No, nothing’s wrong. I just like looking at you, is all.”

Self-consciousness slams back into her, that heady mix of shame and discomfort a weight she’d somehow managed to forget in the aftermath of really great sex and the disorienting fog of heat. Ruby stares down at her bare feet next to Billy’s on the dorm room carpet and wants to disappear into the floor. The big toe on her right foot twitches.

Billy nudges her with his shoulder. “You’ve got great tits, you know.”

Ruby hides her face with her hands, even though she really wants to wrap her arms around her stomach instead. She cannot believe she’s having this conversation. “Thanks, man.”

“I’m serious.”

“About my tits being great?”

“Of course, but also -” He tugs her hands down, looks her in the eyes. “You know you’re hot, right? You are so fucking sexy, Ruby. You’ve got to know that.”

Ruby shrugs. “Sure,” she says, the lie slipping easily off her tongue. It’s not even completely a lie - Billy obviously thinks she’s at least somewhat attractive, since he said yes to having sex with her in the first place - so why not? And her breasts _are_ pretty great compared to the rest of her. So she has great tits. Sure. Why not.

Billy hesitates, then frowns, like he’s not sure whether to believe her or not. Ruby’s hideously grateful when he lets the subject drop, gesturing toward her with the washcloth he’s holding instead.

“I brought this for your neck,” he says. “Can I -?”

Ruby tilts her head, baring her throat. The water stings her exposed glands, but the washcloth is cold and soothing where Billy dabs it against her skin. The washcloth comes away with the faintest hint of red to it, and not that Ruby hadn’t believed him when he’d said so, but holy shit, he really _did_ bite her.

He leans in to kiss her when he’s done. He clearly intends it to be a sweet, quick, peck-of-the-lips gesture, but that same overpowering taste of him swarms up, and he slants his mouth more fully against her and Ruby opens her mouth, and Billy drops the washcloth to the ground as he threads fingers back up into her hair.

“Ruby,” he gasps, and it all starts again.


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello! Hi! It's been a while - I'm excited to be back working on this story again.
> 
> Continued thanks to my amazing beta reader htbthomas!

“Okay,” she pants, “okay, okay, we need to talk about the condom thing.”

Billy nuzzles himself in closer to her neck, woozy and affectionate.

“Come on.” She nudges him in the thigh with her foot. “Help me out with this. Let’s do this. I want to talk about this.”

“Fine,” he mutters.

They flip over as a unit and navigate themselves so that Billy can pull himself backward up the bed, to sitting. He ends up leaning against her headboard, wooden and beat up after what Ruby can only assume are years of school-issued service, with Ruby in his lap, still knotted, facing him.

Billy’s eyes are glassy, despite the fact that he’s still inside of her. She thinks that means his rut is progressing pretty fast.

“So. Condoms.” She takes a deep breath and tries to clear her own sex-addled mind, holding up fingers as she counts. “One: I’m on birth control. Two: I was tested as part of the incoming omega freshmen class gamut of awful, invasive things they have you do, and I haven’t had sex since then, so I know I’m clean. Three: I’m the first and only person you’ve had sex with, so I can only assume there are no STD issues there.”

“Still.” He skates his hand around her hip, because he can’t seem to stop touching her now. “The condom thing - I don’t know. Doesn’t it seem sort of... reckless to you?”

“We’re being the total opposite of reckless. We’re having this mature discussion right now instead of you fucking me straight away in a mindless haze earlier today when I basically begged you to.”

“I guess,” he says, slowly. “I just - I always had this idea that you stop using condoms when you’re in, well, a long-term relationship. That it’s a sign of commitment.”

Well. Which, okay, wow. She feels super shitty now.

“Maybe that’s stupid,” he continues, oblivious, then sighs. “I cannot believe this is something I’m actually fighting you on.”

“Sorry,” Ruby manages to say.

“What? Christ, no, don’t be sorry. I’m just saying that it’s a little bit of a jump from me, you know, never having had sex before and trying really hard to be a responsible guy, to what you’re saying. We just have to talk about this stuff.”

Her heart is beating fast, and she’s pretty sure her scent is starting to change. She hates her biology, she hates these stupid omega instincts that step all over her ability to date casually or fuck casually or whatever she’s doing here with Billy. She isn’t wanted; she’s doing everything wrong; she’s displeased her alpha. It’s all such _bullshit_.

“Hey. _Hey_. Are you okay?”

She also hates that she can’t even quietly have a very, very small panic attack without her scent spiking, because of course Billy’s going to pick up on it. What the fuck, body.

“Oh shit,” he says. “Ruby, are you okay?”

She doesn’t want to have to explain any of this thought process to Billy, her friend/now-casual-fuck-buddy, who definitely did not ask for a truckload of weird submissive omega insecurities and possessive bullshit to be dumped in his lap. Ruby takes a deep breath, and then another, and reminds herself, _I asked him to be here, he said yes_ , and makes herself say, “I’m okay.”

“Uh. Are you sure?” His thumbs are rubbing against the glands at her wrist, soothing little circular motions.

“I’m fine. Really, I am. I just… it’s hard to deal with rejection. Not that you’re rejecting me, at all,” she hastens to add. “But I’ve never done this with another person, you now. Been in heat, I mean. It’s... embarrassing. It brings up a lot of really weird stuff.”

“I’m not saying no,” Billy says, just as quickly. “I just wanted to talk about it first.”

“Totally reasonable.”

“This brings up a lot of weird stuff for me, too, you know.”

“Right.”

“It does,” he insists. “It really does. And we said we’d be on the same side here, right? I’m not making fun of you, and you’re not making fun of me.”

“I know. I know, I know, I know.”

He still looks suspicious, but it must be working, because he only asks, “But do you _know_?”

“Yes, you jerk. Hold up.” Ruby manages to wiggle herself out of Billy’s lap, his knot gone down enough to let them pull apart. It’s the same awkward experience it’s always been.

Billy heads into the bathroom to deal with the condom, and Ruby picks up a t-shirt from the floor to pull on and follows him. She looks wild and unkempt in the mirror: hair frizzing out in an awful fashion, and her freckled face an uneven, flushed shade of red. At least her legs look good in this t-shirt, she thinks. Thank god for small mercies.

She looks up from splashing her face to see Billy staring at her in the mirror, just behind her. He’s still naked and half-erect, and wild himself. His hair is sticking up in disorderly spikes, and Ruby has a sudden, visceral, dissociative memory of clutching his hair in her fists as she came.

Her mouth goes dry.

“Why did you ask me to do this with you, anyway?” he asks, watching her in the mirror. “Why me? You’re going into heat, and you look around, and think, yeah, that one, that lanky, ginger Irish fuck over there, he’s the one. Why?”

“You smell good,” she says, lamely, “to me,” and immediately feels like a coward. What an understatement.

“You think I smell good?”

“You know you do.”

“Do I?”

“Are you just digging for compliments now?”

He flashes a grin, like he can’t help himself. “Maybe.”

“Well, you smell -” Ruby draws a quick breath, and goes a bit lightheaded with it, and makes herself say it. “Amazing. Fucking amazing, really.”

Billy goes still. “Yeah?” he asks, casually.

“Yes,” Ruby says, her face hot. She doesn’t know why admitting this feels so exposed. So Billy smells fucking fantastic to her - so what? That’s a pretty normal thing, right? “I mean, don’t get a big head about it or anything. But yeah. I’ve never met anybody who smelled as good to me as you do.” She takes another breath, and tries out the word she’s been avoiding: _alpha_. “I’ve never met another alpha who smells like you do, to me.”

Billy takes a step forward. The tip of his dick bumps the small of her back, and then his dick slides up as he moves closer, trapping the length of him between them, a hot, heavy line against her spine. A stranger with messed-up blonde hair stares back at her from the mirror, with a dazed, horny expression that Ruby barely recognizes as her own.

He buries his head against her neck. “You smell good to me too, you know,” he says, and Ruby drops her head back against his chest. Slick is starting to drip down her thighs again. “Sometimes I’d get close enough to you that I’d smell your hair or something in the middle of class or whatever and I would get hard. It was so embarrassing. You’ve always been so distracting, and I had to pretend like you weren’t.”

He starts to rock against almost absently, frotting his cock up against her back, pressed between their bodies, and oh god, she’s pretty sure they’re about to do it in her bathroom in front of her shitty mirror with the toothpaste splotches that she definitely should have cleaned.

“You always smelled like a fucking wet dream,” he continues, mindlessly rubbing himself against her. “And you’re so pretty, and then you would say something so sharp and funny and mean and it would just make me laugh like crazy, and I’d have to pretend that you weren’t... that.”

Uh. “You... like me?” It’s maybe a weird question, considering they’re definitely already having sex, and it’s not like she’d exactly always thought Billy _didn’t_ like her, but...

Billy stops moving and lifts his head to look at her in the mirror and laugh, like what she just asked is a joke. “Of course I like you. Why do you think I said yes when you asked me to do this?”

“I... don’t know.” This is sort of blowing her mind. She’d never really honestly considered that the way he smells to her - that she might be something similar to him. “Because we’re friends, and what alpha wouldn’t jump at the chance to have strings-free sex with somebody? And then you said you’d never had sex before, and then I thought -”

“You thought I just wanted the chance to fuck somebody, and it didn’t matter who? Knock off a life experience, or whatever?”

“Sure, I guess.”

He frowns. “I mean… maybe a little of that. But a lot of that other stuff. Mostly that other stuff, actually. What’s so surprising about all this, anyway? You like me too, right?”

“Of course I like you,” she says, fast and unthinking, and there must be something more relieving about the way she says it than she intends, because he looks briefly startled, and then Ruby is unnerved to see his surprise slip into a disconcerting confidence.

“You’re into me, huh?”

This is the absolute dumbest conversation to be having with a guy she’s already had sex with multiple times, and is definitely about to bone again really soon, if the giant erection wedged up against her is any indication. “That’s hardly a surprise at this point.”

He grins, lazy and smug, and he seems relatively in control except for how dilated his pupils are. “How embarrassing for you.”

“Oh my god! You should talk.”

“Oh, I’m definitely into you.” He kicks at one of her feet with his own. “Hey. Spread your legs a little.”

She shuffles her feet out and Billy leans back a bit to angle his dick downward, bending his knees to slide his cock between her legs. There’s some weird fumbling for a moment, but then it’s like Billy just gives up and positions himself to _rub_ himself between her thighs instead, lubricated by the mess of slick there, instead of actually figuring out how to push inside of her from this angle.

Ruby puts her palms down on the bathroom counter to counterbalance them and instinctively brings her legs closer together.

Billy drops his forehead against her shoulder and groans, and starts to move his hips, pinned tight between her legs.

Ruby’s never done anything like this before - she’s never had sex from behind, only mostly-awkward intercourse in the missionary position, and she’s certainly never had some guy basically jack himself off between her pressed-together thighs - and it seems somehow actually a little dirtier than the actual sex they’ve been having: the sounds it makes, the fact that his dick never goes _in_ , him panting fast against the neck.

She wonders, suddenly, if he’s doing this because this is something they can do without a condom. If this is, like, some sort of compromise after their previous discussion, and she doesn’t know, but it doesn’t seem quite - 

Then Billy shifts his position, leaning his weight more heavily into her, and the angle of his cock shifts as well, and suddenly he’s not just rubbing against her folds, but the head of his cock is also bumping and sliding up against her clit, and Ruby’s legs go weak. Her knees give out, actually _give out_ , which Ruby hadn’t quite realized was a peril of having sex standing up until this very second. She only stays up by virtue of being pinned against the sink counter.

“Oh shit,” she gasps, and Billy throws an arm around her torso to help her stay up. His forearm comes up under her breasts.

They’re both gasping now, and the more wound-up Ruby gets the more she wants him inside of her. She can feel her thoughts going primitive, and she wants to snap at Billy to _just do it already_ , when he sort of dips his knees one more time, and finally, _finally_ , there’s that moment where he pushes inside of her, and Ruby’s heat-muddled thoughts flatline, her limbs going heavy and hot.

Billy is trembling, his face buried at the base of her neck, right on top of her mating gland.

A little frisson of sobriety shivers through Ruby, because all of a sudden she’s really not sure where Billy’s head is at right now.

She’s wearing a t-shirt, so he’s not touching her gland directly. His breath is hot and fast and it’s making the fabric start to cling damply to her skin there, and his fingers keep flexing against her torso. He’s shaking, and he's definitely inside of her without a condom for the first time.

“No condom,” she makes herself say, mostly like a question.

He moans, and rubs his forehead and cheek up against the middle of her shoulders, like he's trying futilely to scent her mating gland through the fabric. “I know,” he mumbles against her back.

Cold and heat are alternating skating over her skin, and her thoughts are tripping over themselves. _I guess we’re doing this_ she thinks, and says out loud, her tongue thick in her mouth, “Okay.”

The motion is a bit awkward at first, as they both try to figure out what they’re doing, but really, it’s good, it’s crazy how good it is. Billy seems basically out of his mind, and all Ruby can really think is that she’s glad she’s wearing the t-shirt because she doesn’t know how she could take him being on top of her mating gland without the layer of fabric there, if it was bare skin on bare skin. And then the world shatters around them, and she stops thinking at all.

*

It’s a lot weirder, it turns out, to be knotted together afterwards upright over a bathroom sink. They do a coordinated shuffle-step to back away from the counter before sinking down to the floor of the bathroom, splayed across Ruby’s fluffy bathroom rug. Billy big-spoons her, and Ruby thinks it’s actually more comfortable than having the two of them face-to-face the whole time, despite the lackluster overall location. 

After a while he starts playing with her tits, brushing his fingers across the nipples. It’s mostly out of boredom, she’s pretty sure, idle exploration more than anything else (because, yeah, hanging out in one’s bathroom waiting for a knot to go down isn’t the most scintillating way to pass the time), but Ruby’s still wearing the t-shirt and he’s rubbing the fabric of it against her nipples, and amazingly enough it’s actually really doing it for her. Soon she’s squirming back on his knot, feeling keyed up and hot. She’s secured so thickly into place so that she can hardly move, but she wants that movement again quite desperately.

Billy drops a hand down between her legs, cautiously. “Yeah?”

Ruby manages to make some vaguely affirmative noise in answer.

He’d only done this once, briefly and clumsily, the first time they’d had sex, so he fumbles around a bit trying to find her clit again, until Ruby takes his hand and emphatically shoves it in the right spot.

It doesn’t take long, even though he isn’t very good at it. Ruby orgasms lying on her side, writhing and stretched out and aching, while Billy breathes “oh fuck, oh fuck” into the back of her neck.

She’s just finished, gasping and limp, when he pushes her over onto her stomach on the bath mat and wedges her knees open with his own. She can’t believe he’s ready to go again so soon - alphas have the most ridiculous refractory periods, she really gets that now, but _still_. He snaps his hips up, searching for any kind of friction. After a few tries he seems frustrated with his inability to fuck her while locked together, and presses his right hand flat against the small of her back, pinning her fully underneath him, trying to give himself the leverage to arch his back and work his hips harder, grunting.

It doesn’t take long. He comes weakly, gasping, his entire body collapsing on top of Ruby’s. He can’t knot her any further, but he pumps forward a few times, spending in her body again.

They daze out on the bathroom floor until Billy’s knot goes down enough to finally pull apart.

It's a mess. Come and slick trickles down Ruby's thighs, sticky and obscene, and she finds it a little gross but also fundamentally, deeply, weirdly right. Billy helps her clean up and then they both stagger back into Ruby’s dorm room to curl up on the bed again, under blankets. It’s snowing heavily outside, blanketing the sidewalks and streetlights in white, and frost has edged the panes of her window in intricate geometric patterns.

Ruby sleeps for a couple hours, exhausted and sluggish, and wakes up mindless in the dark, Billy's erection wedged up against her ass. They slip into sex with none of the nervousness or nerve-racking anticipation of before, but rather with a deep, painful, half-asleep want, like Billy is trying to crawl up inside of her body, and Ruby wants nothing more than to be subsumed and overcome.

She falls back asleep with Billy still knotted deep inside of her, orgasm settling into her bones alongside exhaustion.

*

She’s starving when she wakes up again.

It’s daylight outside, the bright, cold, searingly clear blue of winter outside her window. She’s sort of distantly confused why she’s so hungry. She feels disconnected from her body, like she’s floating, like she wants something she doesn’t even -

“Where are you going?” Billy mumbles next to her, and snakes an arm around her waist. “Don’t go.”

“I’m…” Ruby was definitely going to do something, but she’s struggling to remember what exactly it was. She was...

“Don’t.” He noses at her neck. His scent is spiking dramatically. “Oh my god. You smell...”

It’s suffocating to be pressed down into the mattress but also so, so good. Billy is casually rougher this time, a bit more assured with what he’s doing, or perhaps not so much in his own head at this point. Ruby feels pretty out of it herself, and it’s only after orgasming multiple times, Billy’s weight heavy on top of her, does she scrap together enough brain cells to think, _food_. That was it. Food.

“Food,” she manages to say, her voice rusty. “We need to eat, Billy.”

“Mmmmphhhh,” he agrees, and when he’s finally able to he grabs them a couple of protein bars from her stash.

He watches her eat with this weird intensity, like he’s checking that she’s not faking it or something, and makes her drink water, and he’s basically still hard the whole time, and as soon as Ruby licks her finger to pick up the last stray crumb he’s on her again.

*

He strokes her arm idly, both of them looking out of the window. Ruby’s thoughts feel wide open and slow, like the deep, black part of the ocean, separate from whatever small concerns the surface of the water might be dealing with. The sun is shining, and people must be going to and forth busily on the sidewalks beneath them, to classes or study groups or working to clear the newly fallen snow, but that all seems incredibly distant, a small concern outside the boundaries of their little world.

“So what would you be doing if I wasn’t here?” he asks, after a while.

Ruby twists to lie on her stomach, facing Billy. Their shoulders and elbows touch within the limited space of her twin bed.

“Uh. Masturbating,” she says, then laughs a little, feeling weirdly embarrassed to be saying the word, even stark naked next to a guy who is also stark naked who has been, after all, been sticking his dick in her mindlessly and basically constantly.

“Do you really just masturbate the entire time you're in heat?”

“Well, no, not really. I sleep and eat and watch porn or regular TV sometimes but mostly I’m just out of it, I guess. But yeah, I masturbate. I masturbate a lot.”

“I’ve always thought - maybe it’s naive, but it always seemed kind of cool to me.”

“Ugh,” she says, wrinkling her nose. “You would think that.”

He laughs. “Confirming all your worst suspicions?”

“Of all alphas, really.”

“Ha. Fair enough.” A pause, then he continues, more awkwardly, “So I know that it’s supposed to - when you’re in heat, and there isn’t an alpha around to... see you through it - that they say that it hurts.”

“Is that a question?”

“I guess so?”

“If you’re asking if it hurts, then yeah. That’s true.”

He hmms thoughtfully, almost neutrally. “That sucks.”

“You could say that. It sucks a lot, actually. Heats by yourself are the worst,” she continues, warming up to the topic. She never really gets to just _talk_ about this stuff much with other people. “They’re the fucking worst. The only reason I usually end up masturbating all the time is because it’s the only way to really help. I don’t find it cool or sexy, it’s just… a thing you do because you feel so shitty, otherwise. That’s it.”

“But you being in heat - it’s not shitty this time, right?” he asks, cautiously.

It’s one of those questions that sounds simple, she thinks, but really isn’t.

“No,” Ruby says, slowly. “It’s not shitty.”

Billy’s lying face-down next to her, long and lean. His ginger coloring spots little freckles down his back, his skin bare down to his waist, where her comforter wraps around his hips.

“I’m glad,” he says, quietly and seriously. “It’s sort of killing me, to think of you going through something like this by yourself, without…” He hesitates. “Without an alpha, I guess.”

 _Without him_ , Ruby thinks. He was going to say that he doesn’t want to think about her going through this without _him_. Her heart starts to beat faster.

“It’s the opposite of shitty, really,” she says, trying to make him understand with her tone what she’s having a hard time saying. “When you’re here.”

He traces a fingertip down the line of her spine. “I wish I’d met you sooner.”

“What? Why?”

“Because I keep thinking about you going through heats on your own.”

“We didn’t meet until the fall, and this is the first time I’ve gone into heat since then,” she points out. “There’s really not much more you could have done.”

“I’m going to invent a time machine and go back in time so you don’t have to spend any of your heats by yourself.”

It's so out of nowhere that she laughs, despite her. “What? A heat time machine?”

“Yup. And then I retroactively fuck you through every single one of your heats.”

And she knows he’s joking, _obviously_ it’s a joke, but there’s also this strained, possessive little edge to his voice when he says it, almost fervent, like he actually means it at the same time, and Ruby remembers him saying, _this brings up a lot of weird stuff for me, too_. She remembers him saying that he likes her. It's surreal, it's almost unbelievable, the idea that he could actually like her the same way she likes him.

_You always smelled like a fucking wet dream._

“I mean, I’m definitely going to be famous one day,” he continues, his eyes flickering away from her then, like he’s visibly trying to repress some of the weird intensity he’s suddenly giving off. “So why not have it be for inventing time travel.”

She clears her throat. “So you invent a time machine, that you then use to fuck that one girl you know in college, but back when she was a teenager.”

“You were probably so hot in secondary school.”

“Maybe. If you like them awkward as fuck and weird-looking.”

“So. Fucking. Hot,” Billy repeats.

“Gross,” she says, and Billy laughs, and leans forward to kiss her, then moans, and drags her in closer to kiss her harder.


End file.
